"Could not update ICEauthority file" after login (independent of gnome)

It's a simple permissions issue. One of two things will work:

First, try the following:

sudo chown username:username .ICEauthority

sudo chmod 0644 .ICEauthority

Change username to your own username (so in your situation it would be wellington).

If that didn't work, you'll need to (unfortunately) start with a new /home directory - however, BACK UP YOUR DATA before you do that. For more on backup solutions, see

• Comparison of backup tools.

I managed to fix the issue by changing ownership and permissons on the folder itself, I used this:

sudo chown username:username /home/username
sudo chmod 700 /home/username

This cleared the problem right away for me.

I had today the same problem, when I moved 'Home' users folders to a different partition. I solved it, not changing permissions in '.ICEauthority' file (in fact, I deleted it), but changing the owners of that folders to their users, recursively:

sudo su
chown -R user /home/user

To do that, in login window, ALT+CTRL+F1 changes to a console. After that, ALT+CTRL+F7 returns to GUI mode. No need to reboot.

P.S.: Having 'home' in a separate partition, is a good way to prevent system crashes, and to upgrade versions. See wiki. I used it to install Ubuntu 12.10 in one notebook, and just to separate partitions in another notebook with 12.04LTS.